Urban History(s) of Intermediate Cities in Latin America

Coordinators:

Fabio Vladimir Sánchez Calderón, professor Universidad Industrial de Santander
Sebastián Martínez Botero, professor Universidad Tecnológica de Pereira
Eulalia Hernández Ciro, professor Universidad de Antioquia

Members of the Colombian Network of Urban History

Justification

Historical reflection on the city has a long tradition in the historical discipline and other related fields of knowledge since its understanding requires an interdisciplinary treatment. Generally speaking, these views can be ascribed to two ways of understanding the urban: on the one hand, as a physical space, studied mainly by architecture and urban planning; on the other, as a social space, an approach favoured by the social sciences, including history. The spatial and cultural turns of the social sciences have implied a greater concern for these two spheres, broadening and problematising the range of options for understanding urban agglomerations.

Despite this breadth and diversity, urban historiography in general, and Latin American historiography in particular, has tended to concentrate on the analysis of large agglomerations and major cities in each country or region, so that knowledge of a large part of urban settlements, whose radius of influence is more territorially circumscribed, is still weak. Similarly, urban history has privileged the analysis of the internal dynamics of cities, regardless of their size, to the detriment of the undeniable and necessary relationships they generate with their surroundings, building urban-regional networks and circuits. As Fernand Braudel and Bernard Lepetit remind us, the change of scale of observation is one of the intrinsic components of urban history: a city is never presented without the accompaniment of other cities, larger or smaller, near or far, and points of support, relays or rivals.

In recent decades, this breadth of themes and approaches has been accompanied by a growing interest in consolidating networks and spaces for reflection and the generation of knowledge, giving rise to joint initiatives, such as this Dossier, which enable dialogue and debate on the city from multiple perspectives, temporalities and spatialities.

In this context, this call hopes to receive contributions on intermediate cities, an ambiguous and diffuse term, which cannot be defined a priori by a number of inhabitants or territorial extension, but by which we wish to denote all those urban settlements that throughout the history of Latin America have not served as national or metropolitan centres of political or economic power, but which have been fundamental in the economic, political, social, cultural and spatial processes of our countries. Thus, the call is open to proposals on intermediate cities for different historical periods, perspectives of analysis or sources of information. In doing so, we hope not only to fill a thematic gap but also to broaden knowledge of urban history from a comparative perspective that aims to go beyond the national frame of reference.

Some of the themes proposed for inclusion in this issue are:

- Everyday life: sociabilities, consumption, representations, public and private spaces.
- Administration, planning, urban governance.
- Inter- and intra-urban links and exchanges: economic, cultural, material, environmental.
- Emergence, consolidation and change of new cities and urban-regional networks.
- Intra- and inter-urban mobility and technological changes in the transport system.
- Architectures, materialities and heritages.

Contact:
- Website in Open Journal Systems:
https://revistas.uis.edu.co/index.php/anuariohistoria/information/authors
- E-mail: anuariohistoria@uis.edu.co